European Defence Policy

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has published European Defence Policy by Karim Maslouh (448 pp.). The author explores European defence policy in its various dimensions and discusses the approaches that have been employed to understand and explain it by highlighting their most important components and demonstrating the fragility of the methodological and disciplinary boundaries that separate them. The book also discusses Europe’s relationship with NATO and attends to the limitations of European strategic independence by the continuation of that relationship, and it sheds light on the role of the slow, hesitant dynamic of the European defence sequence in postponing the resolution of the European Union’s strategic identity. The book reveals that the European Union’s ability to formulate a new understanding of international politics remains limited, as it crafts its understanding through heterogenous foundational structures, NATO’s culture of multilateral bureaucracy, and extant, evolving international structures.

Maslouh begins by discussing the environment of European defence policy, which he argues emerged out of a three-part compound of relationships: French-European, French-Atlantic, and European-Atlantic. The result is that transformations in the EU context, whether security, military, or cultural, are inseparable from European-American ties. Examining past developments, the book then considers French diplomacy with European countries; since facing defeat in World War II, France has used geopolitical, material, and cultural relations in its favour to obtain nuclear weapons, occupy a strong role within the EU, and form a tripartite partnership with the United Kingdom and Germany—all while navigating a complex relationship with NATO. The formation of a European defence force was ambitious, Maslouh argues, because it requires the EU to progress on all levels, including the limitation of national sovereignty, and would have repercussions for Europe’s relations with NATO. The issue is unlikely to be resolved in the medium term given low levels of unity among EU countries, and the continuation of a traditional relationship with NATO increases the likelihood that Europe remain strategically subordinate to the United States.

Next, the book considers a sociological and geopolitical approach to the European defence model, noting that the EU’s strategy is strongly characterised by crisis management and self-restraint. Hence, a political culture has taken shape of treating crises as ongoing events rather than conventional wars. This transformation has presented a theoretical and practical complication for researchers as to the emergence of a new paradigm of transformation in the international system, departing from the previous form largely defined by military settlements such as Westphalia (1648), Vienna (1815), and Yalta (1945).

The outpouring of strategic and security criteria, rules, and commitments within the NATO-EU relationship has become a subject through which to study the impact of NATO, EU policy, and European armed forces on security and mutual defence, to develop concepts to analyse the structure that emerges from this relationship. The objective here would be to offer a critical view of the mental image of NATO’s relationship to European defence. Yet Maslouh argues that these security developments only represent one aspect of this relationship. In service of its continuation in light of growing burdens, leaders and politicians have taken note of the need to expand this relationship to protect the core of the Atlantic security collective, especially by a general rebalancing of this partnership by using components such as reviving past programmes to bring back American military commitment in Europe, promoting a new geopolitics based on commerce and political economy, or revitalising American commitment in Europe as necessary.

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